


Meet Me In Brooklyn

by agentunionjack (thestairwell), capsiclemycaptain



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Amnesia, Haircuts, Hurt/Comfort, Introspection, M/M, Non-Explicit Sex, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, References to Torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-03
Updated: 2018-10-03
Packaged: 2019-07-23 11:50:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 18,333
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16158410
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thestairwell/pseuds/agentunionjack, https://archiveofourown.org/users/capsiclemycaptain/pseuds/capsiclemycaptain
Summary: In 2014, Bucky opens his eyes in a dive apartment in New York – but the last thing he remembers is falling off a train in the Alps in 1944.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This labour of love finally exists! MMIB started three years ago as the second in a two-part gift for Anoushka, the first part of which was _How many Hail Marys is it gonna take?_ published, uh, three years ago? Oops. So when the CABB came along, I decided to jump at the opportunity to finally make myself finish it!! So thank you to Anou for the patience, and also the excellent beta job. You love editing, and this fic has been a real doozy.
> 
> Two months and much stressing and angsting later, here it is, complete with gorgeous art by the incredibly talented and endlessly patient capsiclemycaptain/brooklyn-bisexual!!! ([incredible and amazing art here!!](http://brooklyn-bisexual.tumblr.com/post/178693081917/meet-me-in)) Through my own ineptitude to establish a healthy work-life balance, I've not been available as much as I would've liked. But I've so much fun collaborating with you that it's made the stress all worth it, and we've been mutuals for so long that it's been absolutely brilliant to have the excuse to finally start chatting!
> 
> To everyone else, I hope you enjoy reading this fic as much as I've enjoyed writing it. <3

This isn’t the first time that Bucky’s wondered how his life has come to this, but it certainly is the most aggressive. Because ‘this’, in today’s particular case, is scaling the icy face of a mountain in minus forty (at least) weather, weighed down by seventy pounds of one-of-a-kind equipment and the most ineffectual tent on God’s green Earth. He’s wearing nearly literally every single item of clothing he currently owns, plus a pair of gloves he pilfered from Steve last week, and he’s still lost feeling in half his toes. He wouldn’t be surprised if he only had half his damn toes left at the end of this. It’s a small blessing that, frigid as it is, the air is completely still.

Steve, of course, looks real fucking chipper in his regular uniform witch a single damn layer underneath. Any time a bit of snow shifts under Bucky’s feet, he makes sure to glare up at Steve where he’s taking point. He knows Steve can feel it. He can see Steve’s shoulders laughing every time it happens.

They reach a sufficient ledge in plenty of time to set up. They can fit all themselves and their equipment on, 200 feet above the train tracks on the other side of the ravine, and not so far away that Steve will have trouble securing the zip wire to the opposite mountain. Jones, Dum Dum and Falsworth start on the radio and decoder, Dernier and Morita on supplies, Steve on the wire – and Bucky sits his ass in the goddamn snow and looks down the mountain on sentry duty. He manages to settle his focus for the next couple of hours, but of course it ends up a waste of time. No one apart from them is dumb enough to climb a frozen, near unscalable mountain. Even Steve wouldn’t be up here if he didn’t have to be.

Well. _Probably_ wouldn’t be up here. Steve’s always had something to prove, only now he’s got the body to match. He _would_ climb a freezing mountain, and only in his skivvies if someone dared him to, the stupid bastard.

Not that Bucky’s one to talk. Bucky would be the one daring him, most likely, and he’s done some pretty stupid shit on a dare himself.

“Looking good down there, Buck?”

“Not a soul, ’cept our own damned hides.”

Bucky glances away from the scope for the first time in about three hours. The Howlies are gathered round the equipment, all listening intently, except for Morita who’s glaring into a thermos. Steve is crouching next to Bucky, peering down the mountain, balancing on his toes of which he probably has feeling in all ten, the bastard. He looks sidelong at Bucky and when he catches his eye, he gives a small grin.

“Get some coffee, Sergeant,” he says. “I’ll take watch.”

“You’re the boss, Cap.”

Steve watches without watching as Bucky slowly gets to his feet. Moving his muscles again is damn painful. He manages to keep his groans of pain to himself, but he can’t stop the grimace that comes when he bends his legs and pushes himself up. Steve nods at him and then turns back to the mountainside. He doesn’t use a scope. Bucky gets some barely lukewarm coffee off Morita and listens to Dum Dum’s grousing about the cold. At least he’s got that caterpillar mustache to keep his lip warm.

After a second mug of joe, he rinses out the cup with a handful of snow and gives it back, and then does some more stretches to try and get some feeling back in his extremes. It mostly works.

He ends up standing back next to Steve, at the edge of the little platform, looking down the zip wire and the train track. Not for the first time, he wonders how the hell his life became, well, zipping over a fuckdeep canyon with the safety of naught but the strength of his hands into a train that will almost definitely have guys with disintegrator guns in it.

Despite doing stupid dangerous work in the deadliest war in history for the last several months he still, incredibly, gets nervous. Disintegrator guns, for Christ’s sake. The Bucky of a few years back would never have believed this kind of shit could ever become more than the daydreams of the Howard Starks of the world, let alone be a regular part of his and Steve’s lives. Things were simple back then. “Remember when I made you ride the Cyclone at Coney Island?” he finds himself asking.

“Yeah, and I threw up?”

“This isn’t payback, is it?”

“Now why would I do that?”

Steve looks so goddamn guileless in profile, but when he turns to Bucky there’s mischief dancing in his eyes and Bucky can’t help but grin at him.

He’s freezing his dick off, the only thing he’s eaten for the past six days is fucking C-rations and Logan bars and he’s about to jump off a frozen ledge onto a moving train. But he’s got his best guy at his side, and a group of good men at his shoulder – if he has to live in Hell, there’s no one else he’d want to have with him.

“We were right, Doctor Zola’s on the train,” Gabe says. Steve and Bucky turn in unison, smiles gone as the mission returns. “Hydra dispatcher gave him permission to open up the throttle. Wherever he’s going, they must need him bad.”

Steve goes through the plan again as Bucky and Gabe strap on guns and gear, and then it’s time to use that fucking zip wire. Steve leaps first, not a care in the world. Bucky tugs one last time on the wire, sends up a quick prayer to whoever might be listening that it won’t fucking snap while he’s over the canyon, and pushes off.

It’s almost like flying. The air whistles in his ears and bites at his exposed skin, tugs at his hair and clothes, and Bucky wants to close his eyes. He used to dream of flying when he was a kid, looking at the illustrations in _Peter Pan_ or listening to his Ma read it aloud. But if he does that now, he’s probably gonna end up too intimate with a mountain, so he keeps his stinging eyes open and waits for the right moment to drop.

The flight lasts for years and seconds, and all too soon Bucky releases the handle and lands firmly on top of the train. The wind is trying it damnedest to immediately push him right back off but Bucky forges forward, flattening himself against the train as much as he can to limit drag.

He’s the last to reach the hatch into the train. Gabe has already moved on, slowly forcing his way to the front of the train and Zola. Steve has already spun the wheel on the hatch, but waits for Bucky so as to not give themselves away before they’re ready. Bucky hauls the hatch open, keeping his eye on Gabe and the rest of the top of the train while Steve drops in, and then follows suit.

It’s a regular mission. Even getting separated is nothing new, and neither is Bucky running out of ammo and having a moment of shit-your-pants terror that he’s cornered and weaponless and alone, until Steve appears out of nowhere and tosses him a spare gun and they take out the last Hydra goon.

“I had him on the ropes,” Bucky says, keeping the gun trained on the guy to make sure he didn’t get back up.

“I know you did,” Steve says.

So yeah, it’s a regular mission. Right up until it’s not.

They get a few seconds of warning: the disintegrator guns make a real distinctive whine to power up. Bucky’s acting instinctively before he even realizes that the goon is through the door, ducking out of the way. The cannon blasts Steve across the room, bounces off the shield to tear a hole in the side of the train. Bucky can feel the wind tugging at his clothes and whipping his hair out of shape, but all he can see is the shield laying on the floor.

There’s no time to look round for Steve, to make sure Steve’s okay – but he can use Steve’s shield and protect them both with it, same as Steve would do. He picks it up, plants his feet and faces the Hydra agent.

The beam hits the shield with all the strength of a collapsing building. Time slows down: Bucky skids back, he drops the shield, tries to grab onto something. He falls out the side of the train.

_This is it,_ he thinks, right before his hand catches a loose railing, wrenching on his left arm. It hurts like a mother, but it’s not dislocated. And there’s still hope, because there’s Steve, climbing along the inside-out wall. There’s Steve’s gloved hand, reaching out, so close, and Bucky believes in Steve right up until the moment the rail detaches.

The air rushes through his clothes, chokes his scream from him, roars in his ears. His eyes water, tears or wind or both. The train is gone. All that’s left above him is pristine snow and crystal blue sky.

For a moment, he feels like he’s flying again.

Then he hits the first tree. Bones snap, but he’s gone before the pain reaches him.

 

* * *

 

Consciousness ebbs and flows, and all the while demons torment him. Their touch burns him. Their howls echo in his ears. They crawl inside his body and rearrange his organs, wearing faces that have been burnt into the backs of his eyelids.

Creatures that are part-man part-animal lower him onto a blanket of needles and blades. Pain echoes in his limbs like the aftershocks of electricity, but his limbs are no longer attached to his head. He looks down and sees a river of red staining a white blanket. One of the man-beasts says——

                           ——Hell is red, is fire invisible and underneath his skin, is an eternity strapped to a table. His head rolls and he watches through a fog as a circular saw screeches and whines. He realizes it is screeching and whining through his arm and bile burns in his throat.

“He is waking up,” says a thing that sounds like a man but looks like a robot straight out of a science fiction novel.

“Continue.” That voice is – is – “The procedure has already started.” The voice——

         ——is a demon with Zola’s face. It looms above him, a smile like poison. It greets him by name: “Sergeant Barnes.” He tries to recoil, to scream, to get away. But he’s immobilized, and the tastes of rubber and blood mingle in his mouth.

The demon’s smile fades into a look of evaluation, or disappointment, or anger – he can’t tell. His mind races with fear. He has a moment to wonder if this is the real Zola who has joined him in Hell or if it is a demon who has chosen this face to most torment him, when a new/familiar kind of pain takes over.  Ice fire burns his blood, boiling him alive from the inside.

“You will not

 

                                                               he’s holding a knife and a stiff metal hand is around a kid’s neck. The metal hand is attached to a metal arm which is attached to his shoulder, and the kid is scrabbling for a hold with terror in his eyes. The alleyway stinks of piss. Bucky wrenches his hand away and drops the knife, recoiling from – himself. The kid drops to the ground and runs, and Bucky stares down at his hands in horror.

His stomach is tied in knots and his chest is tight – only when black spots appear in his vision does he realize that he isn’t breathing. He tries to shout for help, for Steve, but all that comes out is a harsh wheeze. He’s going to die, alone and God only knows where. He’s going to die and no one’s gonna find him and Steve won’t know that somehow he survived the fall.

“Ssss——

                           ——

Why don’t they ask him any questions? They stab rods against his skin, needles into his veins, shock him and slice him and drill him. But all they do is make notes. Put a gun in his hand and point at a target. The gun contains only blanks.

They makes more notes. Beat him until he eats again. Tell him the pain will stop if he tells them where he’s from: the answer isn’t New York.

Did he even have a mother?

                                    ——resistant to all our methods.”

He has failed to kill himself. The knowledge of his method is hazy. His past attempts failed; they are hazy too. He is supposed to be sedated right now, but it wasn’t strong enough, and he is helpless as he listens to evil men plan the destruction of his self.

“I have been developing a machine,” says Zola, “that targets the memory. He fights because he remembers; he succeeds because his blood contains a certain chemical. We can do nothing about the chemical and nor should we want to – but the memories . . . If we take those away . . .”

                  He exists outside of a body. They’re crowded round a metal monster that looks remarkably like a chair.

         They’re crowded round a metal monster and they’re not looking very happy

                                                                                 they’re ecstatic

they’re fewer in number. The world rolls away, and he has some distant feeling that his neck has lost strength…

 

 

                                                                        Time

                                                               has

                                                      been

                                             lost.

He knows this as intimately as he knows the anatomy of a Dragunov. The scientist who created him is old and unwell, nearing death; it occurs to him that he is _not_ dead. It feels like a revelation, and it creates a small hollow in his chest, as if a .24 has recently been dug out from behind his sternum.

(But someone else is dead, someone important to him, the name lost. There is an old ache in his chest, he has known this for some time. The ache grows, tightening his facial features and causing his vision to lose focus.)

Technicians and scientists on the other side of the room look at him in concern. The technician fixing his arm pays him no attention and he’s struck by the overwhelming urge to escape. There are no straps holding him down; it’s not unimpossible.

(His continued life is not a miracle.)

He sees realization dawn on the scientist’s face. His name is Arnim Zola. He did not create – (his own name is –).

“Sedate him!” Zola cries at the same moment that he lashes out, killing the technician with the very metal arm he just fixed. He (he, _Bucky_ ) only feels grim, ironic satisfaction.

A fourth person dies as a needle pierces his neck and the world loses color and lists to the side.

“Wipe him,” Zola says. Bucky failed to kill Zola. He sneers at the old man, laughs when the old man recoils. “Wipe him immediately!” His voice trembles.

Bucky ( _remember who you are_ ) is manhandled into the chair. Just as the world begins to fade——

 

                                             ——a bullet in his stomach. The pain is nothing compared to – to.

The woman on the other side of the trigger might look impassive to the casual viewer, but he is not the casual viewer. He knows that he is being examined for signs of pain.

The wound is nothing. There have been worse pains (the mindwipe, a thirty mile march with a fractured rib, the loss of –).

His face remains still. His body follows orders, picking up a grenade launcher and firing it at the target. The recoil ratchets up the pain, he can feel it in every inch of his body; the edges of his vision blur. He ignores it.

“Very good, Soldier,” the woman says. He has done well. Maybe he’ll get

 

         (the loss of Steve)——

 

 

                                    The man is handsome (he doesn’t notice such things). He has blonde hair and blue eyes, with freckles like dust over his nose and cheeks, almost as tall as himself.

He is the mark, the mission.

He, names are important, names are unimportant; his mission’s name is unimportant; he has no name himself but he is Codename: Winter Soldier.

He flips his knife into the air once, twice – testing the weight and how it is affected by the wind. The handler at his shoulder is still, but her impatience rolls off her like stage smoke so he throws the knife and it hits home: dead center, perfectly vertical, in the mission’s forehead. Blood trickles down the man’s face, splitting into three thin streams when it reaches his nose.

The party fills with screams, but they are unimportant. What is important is pride in a job well done, and the congratulations he gets from his handler.

There is a moment, between one sentence and the next, that he doesn’t understand what his handler is telling him; he only knows that she is speaking in Russian. In that moment, terror fills him: he is faulty, he is broken, he is useless, he will be put down.

And then: “It is time for the final procedure,” the Russian woman says with a proud smile. She is still speaking Russian, and he doesn’t understand how he understands. “You have earned your reward, Soldier.”

Everything is wrong. He makes what feels like his first decision in a long time and says, “No.”

The woman’s face turns to ice. He knows he’ll be getting this procedure, but a light in his chest keeps him fighting and fighting and fighting for all his worth.

But he is worth very little and therefore quickly subdued. Once restrained, the woman spits at him and backhands him, snapping his head to the side——

 

         ——he has a secret deep in bones, hidden from his handlers and his masters and his scientists: it is a secret image that comes to him in the few moments in the cryo chamber when his brain is being frozen but before it is frozen completely, the closest thing he has to a dream: there is dancing and laughter, words that are meaningless to him now but carry a weight of history; there is a small guy leaning against a wall, but even standing straight he barely reaches chin-height; the distance shortens between the man and himself and the small man smiles and his own mouth echoes; hands on his shoulders, on his waist, on his back, gentle and kind (more words that are meaningless that used to not be meaningless): and then, a dark room with a man frowning above him, frowning with care for a person and not a weapon: the faces impose over each other, the bodies impose over each other; he dances with both, to the backdrop of smooth saxophone and bright plinks of a piano and a sultry rhythm: hands cup his smiling cheeks, stubble scratches familiarly at his chin——

 

                           An imprint of sight: his left arm (the one gifted to him) holding up a woman by her throat while gore connects her stomach, held in his right hand, to her body. An imprint of emotion: Is she the one who took his self away? He is angry, so angry – and he is also scared because out of the corner of his eye he can see a space where the package should be, and without the package he has failed his

                                                      mission is two level six targets. His body moves with precision but his mind is unfocused. The unexpected third is quickly taken out, unimportant; the targets themselves put up a fight. They isolate him from his team.

The woman damages his goggles, the bullet ricocheting off one eye and causing a mild concussion. The man damages his arm, digging in the shield that is heavier than it looks. As their fight continues, the man flips him and in the process rips off his mask.

The man moves out of his fighting stance, and it’s enough to make him pause. The move is illogical; a threat level six wouldn’t let his guard down. He keeps his own guard up, expecting a trap.

And then the man says——

                                                                        Who is? He is?

                  Bucky?

                                             ——Steve says——

         ——anger triumph horror a terrible emptiness where there should have been loss but there isn’t anything an echo of loss——

                           I’m with you ’til the end of

 

 

 

                                                                        the scope is powerful. More powerful than anything he had during the war. It’s directed at the street, and his muscles carry the sense of recent movement, but before he can figure anything out Bucky has to pull away to throw up. It’s mostly bile, and it pulls on his stomach – when was the last time he ate?

When he finishes spitting and looks round for some water, he catches sight of some MREs, and changes his question: when was the last time he ate something half-decent?

Then he wonders when he is, and where, and how. And why he has a metal arm in place of a flesh one. He fell out of a train, he was taken by… by Zola? No, that can’t be right. There’s no way Steve or the other Howlies would’ve let that rat get away, and there’s _no_ way they would’ve let him continue his sick experiments while imprisoned. He was tortured, that much is for sure. But when he tries to remember, he gets only echoes and outlines.

“Fuck.” His voice is rough, in a way that suggests he hasn’t said much in a while. He remembers feeling his vocal chords tear from screaming.

The room he’s in is clear; one door leads to a bathroom, another to a storage cupboard, and the third into a corridor. The cupboard and bathroom are empty. In one corner of the room, the corner that can’t be seen from any of the windows or doors, there’s a folded blanket and a large backpack. He empties and repacks it (basic toiletries, a spare change of clothes, two pairs of underwear, three and a half jars of peanut butter, a bottle of water, basic survival gear, three hundred dollars in twenties: he pauses, having never seen such a dizzying amount of cash before, and then forces himself to put it away), and knows that the only bugs in the room are the ones he put there himself.

Somehow.

It’s the walls that hold his attention the longest. Two are covered with newspaper cuttings, printed pages and notes in his own handwriting - about Steve, and a number of other people whose names he don’t recognize. The headline CAPTAIN AMERICA RETURNS, SAVES NEW YORK FROM ALIENS makes his stomach churn, but it’s the date that knocks him back. ‘April 30th, 2012’.

“What the fuck?” He feels like he might throw up again, so he takes a break and goes back to the window. The sniper rifle worries him, but it doesn’t build up panic the way an article about Hydra in the White House does.

Outside is dark, but the streets are well-lit. The building opposite is featureless: a block building five floors tall and nine windows across, with steps leading up to a door and two basements. There are people walking in the streets, a lot looking like they don’t belong out of a blue movie, others like they got dressed half-drunk in the dark. But there are no signs he can see from his window, no clues to where he is. He’d think he was back home, except New York has never smelled so clean.

Eventually he manages to detach himself from the room and starts reading through the walls. The story the walls tell is unbelievable, like something out of _Amazing Stories_ … except his best friend turned from a scrawny brawler into a powerhouse and national icon, he’d seen a man pull off his face, and he’s surrounded by newspapers from the twenty-first century with a whole chunk of memory missing. His boundaries for ‘unbelievable’ have shifted in recent years.

Seventy years. His parents are probably long dead.


	2. Chapter 2

Dawn is breaking by the time Bucky’s finished reading through the papers. He doesn't know what date today is but the latest newspaper is from April 26th, 2014. He's strangely not tired, even though he's been… aware for over seven hours. (How long has he been awake?) He is pretty hungry, though, so he finishes off the half jar of peanut butter. He has some suspicions how he made it to the 21st century without any noticeable signs of ageing, but there are still too many factors missing to figure out the full picture. It probably has something to do with Hydra (he remembers lying on a metal table, lava moving through his veins) but he'd bet his bottom dollar that it has something to do with his missing arm and memories.

God, but he hates peanut butter.

Once he's finished, he burns all the paper and destroys all his bugs and traps. He doesn't need any of it; what he needs is to find Steve, and to find out what the ever-loving hell is going on. Everything else he packs into the rucksack, pulls the cap low over his eyes, and leaves the apartment forever. He doesn't know what's waiting for him outside, but he also doesn’t want to come back here… wherever here is.

The air is warm but without much humidity, out on the fire escape. He drops down into the alley without bothering with clanking steps or ladder and, after observing at the mouth for a few minutes, walks onto the street, shoulders hunched and hands fisted in his pockets. He feels sloppily dressed, loose denim pants and baggy hooded sweater. A number of them are talking into devices held up to their faces, like a miniature radio – another way he looks like an outsider.

Bucky eavesdrops; the conversations don't make much sense, or they're gossip about people he doesn't care about, but they're all speaking American English. So he might not be in friendly territory, but so far he's got no proof that the Nazis or the Japs won. He's not naïve enough to hope there haven't been any more wars in the last seventy years, but he's apparently made it home and that's nothing to sniff at.

Making himself as inconspicuous as possible, Bucky follows the crowd. Most of them head down into a subway. Into Lafayette Avenue, A and C line. He stops walking dead and stares.

“Hey, get off the sidewalk,” some guys says as he pushes past Bucky's shoulder. Bucky ignores him.

He's in Fort Greene. He's in fucking _Brooklyn_ , not even twenty minutes from his own neighborhood. And now he recognizes – almost recognizes – the city around him, the roads and the trees and the building fronts, and he remembers that just a block away is (was?) a great dance hall. The memory comes to him so vividly, presses around him so strongly, that he almost feels like he’s back there right now: the warmth of a pretty girl under his arm and the scent of her perfume, the sharp whiskey on his tongue and the tacky texture of transferred lipstick on his mouth, the night cooling the sweat on his skin from a night of enthusiastic dancing. Unbridled happiness still dancing round his insides.

And then just as suddenly as the memory had appeared, it vanishes again, leaving Bucky warm in the spring afternoon air with a weight pulling on his back and hair that desperately needs a cut, and a terrible sense of loss. Loss for his youth, for his carelessness, for his home. If he’d known how he was gonna end up… But then, if the war had never happened, Steve never would’ve grown and Bucky probably would’ve helplessly watched him die.

His life for Steve’s – not the easiest choice. But God knows how many times he’d offered it as a kid, and it looks like God heard him.

His feet move without thinking; they take familiar steps through almost-familiar streets, his heart hammering in his throat… There had been a butcher, a grocery store, the music store Bucky worked at, the site of his and Steve’s school now apartments. His parents’ walk-up is gone, but Steve’s is still there, and there’s a plaque on the front: THE STEVE ROGERS MUSEUM. BIRTHPLACE OF STEVE ROGERS, JULY 4TH 1918.

A museum. The sheer absurdity of it is momentarily overwhelming, and Bucky’s knees give out underneath him as he falls laughing to the ground.

A fucking _museum_. Shit, now there’s something he hadn’t seen coming.

After a couple of minutes, he gets his legs back and drags himself down the road, still intermittently laughing. He hadn’t drawn too much attention – it definitely wouldn’t have been so good as to find himself in the attention of the museum staff, who would most likely recognize him straight off the bat – but he hurries off anyway.

He doesn’t manage to calm himself down again, but his humor is knocked out of him by walking out onto a pathway along the river where before there had only been warehouses. He stops and gapes – he can see Manhattan, the Brooklyn Bridge and Lady Liberty. He spins round, trying to orient himself, but all else he can see are upscale townhouses, bountiful trees, benches and pavement filled with families and tourists. _This ain’t New York, no way._

He’s suddenly exhausted, but it’s a kind of exhaustion that’s become intimately known to him over the past two years of war (of memory). He’d felt this in moments of quiet and soberness, whenever his hands held neither gun nor glass. He drops onto the nearest empty bench, puts his backpack between his legs and rests his head in his hands. The future’s marched on without him, and now he’s in a country that’s as alien to him as England had been when he’d landed back in 1943. Same language, different world.

Tangled up in self-pity though he may be, however, he’s not so absorbed in it that he doesn’t notice when the back of his neck prickles under someone’s gaze. He doesn’t look up, doesn’t give himself away. Just tenses minutely, ready to fight – or flee.

A figure appears in the corner of his eye, and the silhouette is as familiar as breathing. Bucky deflates, like a hot air balloon all out of gas.

“Buck.” Steve’s voice is stiff, braced for rejection. “Do you remember me?”

Something cracks in Bucky’s chest. Tension, perhaps, or fear, or maybe his heart. He stares down at his backpack, looking for smudges of dirt, and watches Steve in his periphery.

“Aw, hell, Steve. I’ve really been gone for that long?”

Steve’s face goes through a whole mix of emotions before settling on cautious joy.

“They say the year is 2014,” Bucky adds. “That true?”

“That’s what I’ve heard,” Steve says. “Welcome to the future. The burgers are to die for.”

Bucky feels an absurd urge to laugh and decides to follow through. And then he decides he’s sick of feeling too scared to look at his best friend, so all at once he pushes himself to his feet and turns 84˚ to the left and looks Steve dead in the way. Over Steve's shoulder, Bucky sees another guy shift in a way that means there's a gun pointing at Bucky right now, but they both ignore him. Bucky's eyes don't stay still, though, moving over Steve's face. Cataloguing all the small signs that years have indeed passed since he's seen his best friend.

“Never thought I’d be so happy to see your ugly mug,” Bucky says, voice wobbling. Steve’s smile is sunshine after a storm.

“This mug is a national treasure, I’ll have you know. What’s your excuse?”

“I tripped and fell down a mountain.”

“Should’ve tried a bathhouse.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.”

They look at each other for a moment. Steve’s eyes continue flickering over Bucky’s face, but Bucky’s had his fill of examination. He’s just looking. And Steve looks good.

“It's really good to see you, Buck,” Steve says warmly, and pulls Bucky into a hug. Bucky returns it straight away, disconcerted by how different Steve feels in his arms compared to - in his mind - a mere week ago. But he melts into it all the same.

They don’t pull apart from a long time. Bucky stays where he is because separation would mean facing the future again, and finding out the truth. He imagines Steve keeps hold of him for the flip side of those reasons. Whatever the truth is, it must suck.

A throat clears, and Bucky opens his eyes. The other guy has come up to them, all dark skin and neat facial hair and an expression that is bewilderment, boredom and exasperation all at once. He’s still far enough away that Bucky couldn’t reach him before he’s shot with the still-hidden gun, but the guy’s stance is considerably less tense.

“Don’t you think it’s time to get moving?” the guy says, mostly to Steve, although he's still watching Bucky. “We’re not gonna be able to distract the tourists for much longer.”

Steve’s sigh is almost – but not quite – imperceptible, and then he pulls away, but still keeps a hand on Bucky’s back. Not that Bucky’s one to talk: he can’t quite bring himself to disconnect from Steve either.

“Yeah, you’re right,” Steve says. “And – Bucky, Sam. Sam, Bucky.”

Sam nods, and the way he’s still tracking Bucky’s movements would be threatening had Bucky had an easier life. Still, he’s not gonna mess with the guy. Not until he knows why Sam’s pissed off, anyway.

Sam takes the lead to a car parked illegally behind some houses. Bucky hadn’t got used to the sleek-looking cars in the half hour that he’d been walking around before, but even so, he knows that this car is _expensive_. Sam gets into the passenger seat, and Steve beats Bucky to the car and holds one of the rear doors open for him. This is when they finally stop touching each other.

Steve gets into the driver’s seat and Bucky says, “Buddy, should you really be driving?”

“I know what I’m doing,” Steve protests.

“Man,” Sam says, “if you weren’t Captain America, you’d have lost your licence after Chicago.”

Steve doesn’t say anything, just pulls away from the curb.

After a moment of silence, Sam speaks again. “I have a feeling I’m gonna regret asking this but… Steve, do you even have a licence?”

“You know, I never actually got round to it.”

Sam forces Steve to pull over and switch sides, to which Steve acquiesces with a suspiciously guileless grin. Sitting in the passenger seat, Steve now turns in his seat so his back is against the window and he can look at both Sam and Bucky.

“This is some car,” Bucky says, running his right hand over upholstery that feels like fine leather. He can stretch his legs out comfortably – not to their full length, but ‘cramped’ would not be the operative word. The back windows are tinted. Everything is black and silver and shining and expensive. Even with the engine running and potholes on the road, the car barely judders or jumps.

“It’s not ours,” Steve says. “We’re just borrowing it.”

Could be he means ‘borrowing’ in the traditional sense, that he’s got a friend or a colleague (or a lover? No) with expensive taste. Could be he means it like they did in 1943 when they needed to get seven men urgently from point A to point B and hot-wired any nearby working vehicle.

Bucky looks through the window, watching the familiarly unfamiliar streets whiz by. He’s never moved this fast through Brooklyn, and he loses track of where he’s supposed to be pretty quickly. He doesn’t ask for clarification.

He can feel Steve’s eyes on him, and he keeps looking back out the corner of his eye, or else catching glimpses of his foreign reflection in the window. They make intermittent, inconsequential conversation, and as the they drive more south than Bucky’s ever been while staying in the borough, his eyebrows rise higher and higher.

Finally he asks, “Where is it we’re going anyway?”

“Howard’s son,” Steve says, his voice doing interesting things, “he’s got a place in Manhattan Beach he doesn’t use, and the lease is under a fake name, so we use it as a safe house.”

“Stark Junior actually bought it for him,” Sam interjects, “but fool over there is too proud to accept it and wants to buy his own fifteen-square-foot shithole.”

Bucky snorts. “Yeah, that sounds about right.”

“Hey now,” Steve protests.

“No, man, he's got you pegged,” Bucky says. “You been watching his back, Sam?”

“I try,” Sam says.

“So Stark had a kid, huh?”

“His name’s Tony.” Steve says the name with an underlying mix of affection and frustration. It’s not quite that’s how he talks – would talk – about Howard, but it’s not that far off either. “He’s, uh, abrasive sometimes, but he’s a good guy.”

Finally they turn to a gate, which Steve gets out the car to open, and then enter onto a drive twenty feet long with grounds surrounded by trees. Privacy. Bucky can see why Steve uses it as a safe house.

"Holy shit," Bucky breathes out without meaning to. Sam drives them round the side of the mansion and into an underground garage. It contains another car, much less expensive-looking so probably Sam’s, and three motorbikes, all of which look well cared for but only one which looks used. Even though half the space is filled with junk, it’s still pretty damn huge.

Bucky follow them up a relatively simple staircase to a simple wooden door, which leads to the most extravagant kitchen that Bucky has ever seen.

Sam goes over to one of the counters and begins using one of the contraptions there. It's loud and it steams, and Bucky wants to watch, but Steve gently steers him towards an open door through which all Bucky can see is marble.

"Come on, I'll give you a tour," Steve says, smiling his half-smile that never fails to give Bucky a thrill in his chest.

First, Steve takes him to a room that's the size of Bucky's childhood apartment at least twice over.

“Tony calls it a drawing room,” Steve says. Bucky makes a smart comment about how he doesn't see any easels laying around, and then Steve blows his mind by showing him the television. Bucky’s only ever seen them in shops before; everyone they'd known had either been too poor to afford one or thought it'd been some no-good technology that was going to ruin the country.

But back then, the screen had been about the size of his hand set in a box that must've weighed more than him and Steve put together – now it’s a screen longer than he is tall attached to a wall. And then Steve turns it on, shows Bucky how it works, and Bucky spends a real long time just flicking through the seemingly millions of channels. The picture looks even better quality than real life, which Bucky would have said is impossible but the proof is right in front of him.

“I don't know how you're gonna top this, pal,” Bucky says, after turning off the TV when it started hurting his eyes. “That was just…”

“Just wait and see,” Steve says, and when Bucky looks at him there's a softness around his eyes that makes Bucky think of secret rendezvous and sweat-slicked skin. Something ugly roils in Bucky’s chest from the reminder, from Steve trying to distract him from the past by impressing him with the future. “I’ll take you to a hardware store later – they’ve got tools for _everything_ now. Medicine has come a real long way too, and social issues. People are kinder.”

“What about the war?”

Steve's jaw tightens and his brow creases. It's his disappointed Captain Rogers look. After a moment, he says, “We won.”

Bucky asks, “What year?”

“Buck—”

“Just tell me, Rogers.” Bucky couldn’t pinpoint when he started to hold himself so tense, but now all he can feel is the knots in his shoulders. “All the shit you're not telling me, I wanna hear it.”

Jaw set, brow flat, lips pressed together, Steve's putting on a façade. Even if Bucky hadn't known Steve for his entire life, he'd be able to read the worst poker face in existence.

“1945. August we signed an armistice with Germany, September Japan surrendered.”

“So I fell just a few months before we finished.” Steve nodded. “Jesus. And then how long was it until you crashed into the Arctic? ‘Cause I had a load of articles and shit when I woke up in the future, and more than one of ‘em thought you might've crashed on purpose. Lots of speculation that you could've got away if you'd wanted to, especially once they got a look of Schmidt’s plane.”

“They don’t know. They weren’t there,” Steve says, hard as his shield.

“So you just let yourself die?”

“There was no other way, not when I had to do it alone.”

“You’ve never _had_ to do anything alone, you stupid punk,” Bucky said. “Just ’cause I might’ve died—”

“Exactly, Bucky.” Steve looks away, to the shelves over Bucky’s shoulder. He sounds defeated, a rare enough occurrence that Bucky bites back all the words that are bubbling in his throat. “I thought you were dead. I thought I’d _seen you_ die, and I couldn’t even drink to forget it.” There’s fire again in his voice when he finishes: “But don’t you accuse me of not looking for any other way. It was me or New York, and I chose me.”

Bucky watches him as Steve doesn’t look back. He’s pissed beyond reckoning, and he knows Steve isn’t telling him the whole story. But… maybe he can play pretend in this oversized dollhouse a little longer. His last clear memory from before, made sharp with fear, is Steve’s despair growing ever more distant – he might be alright ignoring reality knocking at the door for a little bit longer.

“You’re such an asshole,” he tells Steve. A range of emotions play out over Steve’s face, too fast and complex for Bucky to pick up on, and he eventually settles on a small smile full of relief. The anger fades out of Bucky, and he grumbles, “It’s not funny.”

“Just glad to have you back.”

 _For fuck’s sake, Rogers, you old sap,_ Bucky thinks, trying very hard not to smile back. It’s not good to let Steve think he can get away with this kind of crap. Out loud, he says, “So are you giving me this tour or what?”

There are five more rooms on the ground floor, containing so much expense that Bucky feels like he’ll be arrested if he so much as looks at anything funny. The only room in which Bucky feels anything approaching ease is the kitchen, despite it being full of un- or barely recognizable devices. The refrigerator has a hole in the front which ice comes out of, and it turns out the machine that Sam made steam is a modern coffee maker.

Bucky watches Steve closely as he makes a coffee, and it’s a far cry from heating shit in a saucepan. It smells damn good, and it tastes even better.

“So what do you think?” Steve asks, a smile tugging at his lips. His eyes haven’t left Bucky in minutes – he’s so obviously excited to be showing off the future, and enjoying Bucky’s running commentary that was probably similar to his own, and that’s the only reason Bucky isn’t slinking right out the door to find that piece of shit apartment back in Fort Greene.

“I’m thinking this coffee is the most expensive thing I’ve ever put in my body by a wide margin.”

Steve laughs. Light dances in his eyes and Bucky wants to grab his T-shirt and lay on him a big old kiss, but Sam is sitting right there, watching cautiously, and Bucky’s no fool. “You can have as much as you want,” Steve says.

Sam speaks up then. “Yeah, help yourself whenever.” He waves his hand in the direction of the coffee robot. “This place is stocked with, like, four different kinds of coffee beans so knock yourself out.”

“We can do that after we’ve seen the rest of the house,” Steve says. He knocks back the rest of his coffee and stands up. “Come on, we’ve still got three more floors.”

“Never understood how a single person needs four floors,” Bucky grumbles, but dutifully follows suit. He’s not so interested in more furniture and decoration that makes him feel like a worthless orphan, but he’s _very_ interested in what other technology the house holds.

The second floor is similar to the first, although what makes the long room downstairs is split up into three. Standing dumbly in a room with nothing but a couple of bookshelves, a bust statue and a few couches, Bucky exclaims, “What the shit is this room supposed to be for?!”

Steve shrugs. “Parties?”

They move on.

The top two floors are where the bedrooms are, as well as fully fitted bathrooms. Steve explains the hot tub to him and Bucky decides he needs to try it out ASAP. Try and get Steve to join him, relax his shoulders a bit, but he’ll let Steve finish giving him the tour first.

“This one’s my room,” Steve says unnecessarily, leading Bucky through the only open door on the top floor. His shield is on the bed, a bag in front of the closet, and on the bedside table is a notebook and pencil.

The bed is a four-poster, and Bucky walks around it impressed. “I think this might be fancier than all your other beds put together,” he says. And then, with a pointed look and a purposeful tilt of his head, he continues, “Including the one in that manor in Yorkshire.”

Steve suppresses his reaction almost immediately, but he’s not fast enough and his blush still lingers. Bucky doesn’t bother to hide his grin – it’s not the one that’s frayed at the edges, the one he’s been stuck with pretty much since he landed in Europe, but it’s dirty and seductive and irresistible to everyone he’s turned it on, Steve included. He falls back onto the bed, and when he moans at how firm the mattress and soft the bed sheets are, it’s entirely, honestly involuntary. It makes Steve stand stock still except for his widened eyes, though, so Bucky will take the credit.

“Buck—” He stops, clears his throat, tries again. “Bucky, we should probably talk—”

“Talking can wait, Steve,” Bucky says. Steve’s trying to be honorable, to tell Bucky about whatever crap’s happened so the air between them’s clear, but to be frank Bucky doesn’t give a shit. He’d decided not to rush into the present, decided to live in the limbo between past and future for a bit longer. So now he’ll drag it out for as long as Steve will let him.

He doesn’t know if Steve picks up on that or if he just loses the battle with his self-control, but it’s only a few moments more before Steve’s on the bed too, kissing him with the desperation of someone long away from home. Bucky grabs Steve’s waist and kisses back, deepening the kiss until his breath is Steve’s breath is his breath, panting and warm and noisy. He tries to pull Steve completely on top of him, unsatisfied with the way he’s lying next to him like they’re virginal schoolkids, but Steve refuses to budge. So he pushes him over instead, straddling Steve’s hips and hovering tantalizingly close above Steve’s crotch. Steve’s hand wraps into Bucky’s too-long hair, and that’s argument enough not to cut it for a while.

They kiss until Bucky’s lungs burn, and then they keep going. He wants to tear Steve’s clothes off and have his way with him, but it’s so damn hot to kiss and kiss and kiss and draw it all out. They haven’t even taken their shoes off. Steve’s hands are buried in Bucky’s hair, and one of Bucky’s hands is keeping him balanced while the other skates up and down beneath Steve’s T-shirt, and the only noises are the occasional moan or loud pant in the seconds they break apart for breath.

Steve pulls away to duck under Bucky’s jaw, where he starts biting and sucking the skin. He skirts around the _really_ sensitive spot for a few moments like the asshole he is, and then attacks it with vigor as one of his hands finally leaves Bucky’s hair to feel him up. Bucky shakes and swears above him, and finally lowers himself onto the hardness in Steve’s pants. Steve gasps into Bucky’s neck and Bucky doesn’t even think before adjusting and swiveling his hips to grind their hard-ons together.

And they’re both still fully clothed. Bucky thinks it’s long past time to change that.

Bucky starts grappling with the button on Steve’s pants – not the easiest feat one-handed while you’re kinda shaking from lust – when Steve flips them both round. His weight presses Bucky full into the bed and Bucky moans, grabbing Steve’s face to drag him into another kiss, working on the button with heightened eagerness even as he keeps getting in his own way, having wrapped his legs around Steve’s waist and started rocking upwards. Steve puts his hands on Bucky’s hips and then—

And then pushes them back down onto the bed, making Bucky’s legs fall off him. He separates their mouths, bats Bucky’s hand away from his fly, and looks down at Bucky with mussed hair, red cheeks and redder lips. Bucky’s mind is clouded with a fog that grows thicker when he realizes Steve doesn’t intend to continue.

“Get back here,” he murmurs, trying to pull Steve back down or grind back up. But Steve is immovable as the marble statue in the vestibule, and the lust fog then begins to clear. His arms drop from around Steve’s neck and he plants his feet on the mattress, and frowning up at Steve he asks, “Seriously, buddy, what gives? We were just getting to the good part.”

“Buck.” Steve looks pained, and Bucky realizes that he’d severely underestimated his friend’s sense of nobility. He’s pretty sure Steve wasn’t this bad a couple of weeks (by his reckoning) ago when they’d taken their pants off even though Bucky’d had a sprained ankle and Steve a briefly broken collar bone.

The future has a lot to answer for, Bucky decides, fuming slightly as Steve slowly sits back on his knees. Bucky holds himself up on his elbows.

“You deserve to know what happened,” Steve says.

“What if I don’t want to know?”

“I want you to hear it from me.”

Bucky hesitates, and then finally, quietly, asks, “How bad is it?”

“Pretty bad.”

“Okay.” Bucky pulls himself upright and then scoots backwards from Steve. The distance between them feels like separate continents all over again. He meets his friend’s eyes. “Start from the beginning.”

“We still don’t know everything. The full timeline. But after… after you… The Russians found you. Decided to keep you on as a spy –” Here, his eyes dart away and his mouth grimaces slightly: signs that Steve Rogers is lying. Bucky’s palms go clammy. “– experimented with indoctrination and brainwashing to make you loyal to them. Stalin probably thought it was hilarious. Taking an American soldier and making him one of theirs.”

“The Russians are – were our allies, though.”

“Not after the war,” Steve says. “They call it the Cold War – no battles, no fights, just everyone spying on everyone else. Not many men behaved honorably then.”

Bucky takes a breath and then takes the plunge: “What aren’t you telling me, Steve?”

Steve looks unbearably sad and heavy, Atlas carrying the world on his shoulders. He leans over to the bedside table, the one with the notebook on it, and takes a file out of the drawer. He hesitates and then hands it to Bucky. He doesn’t recognize the alphabet on the front (a lie: he reads ‘military record’ before his brain shuts down and refuses to understand the Cyrillic alphabet), but when he opens the folder up he recognizes his face.

The rest of the file has been translated into English, and it makes Bucky feel sick. Steve said he was a spy but this – this is murder after murder after murder. He wasn’t made into a spy, he was made into a damned assassin. And the method of his making – brainwashing, torture, conditioning, experimentation, drugs, electricity right to his brain. Bucky frantically reads through the entire contents of the folder; a second time, because he can’t believe any of it’s real; a third and fourth time because he can’t bear to look at Steve’s face.

Then he throws up in Steve’s bathroom. He clings to the toilet – and, God, the metal arm, the metal arm forced on him by _monsters_ that made him into a monster, crumbles the goddamn toilet seat.

After a moment, Steve follows him in. He kneels down next to Bucky and smooths his hair behind his ears, and then firmly, slowly rubs his hand up and down Bucky’s back. Bucky shudders and turns his face away from Steve.

He’d killed a Salvadoran Roman Catholic Archbishop and blown up his funeral. How can Steve look at him? He doesn’t know if he’ll ever be able to meet his own eyes in the mirror again.

Eventually, he has to sit up, flush away the vomit and swill mouthwash. It mostly gets rid of the taste, though Bucky thinks he probably deserves the suffering.

“It’s not your fault, Buck,” Steve says.

“We’ll see,” Bucky says. “I wanna be alone.”

“Okay, Bucky.” Steve sounds sad, but he stands up all the same. “You can take any of the bedrooms if you don’t wanna stay here.”

“Steve…”

Steve pauses at the bathroom door. Bucky pushes himself to his feet and pulls Steve into a fierce hug, which Steve returns.

“Thanks for finding me,” he says.

“I should’ve been faster.”

A not small part of him thinks, _Yeah, you should’ve been._ Out loud, he just says, “It’s not your fault.”

Steve chokes out a small laugh and then Bucky pulls away. He doesn’t watch Steve leave, but as soon as the bedroom door closes he moves. He grabs the folder, gathering the pages that had come loose when Bucky dropped them in his haste to get to the bathroom. He listens for Steve going down the stairs and then enters the empty bedroom across the hall, closing the door firmly behind him.

He reads the folder again, slowly, and tries to remember any of it.

He might be able to remember his arm being sawn off and the metal one being fitted into place, and a room made of shadows and gleaming silver and demons, but the harder he tries to grasp at them, the looser they feel. Like trying to hold onto a dream, the wisps soon all but fade.

He considers praying for all the lives he took, but what good would that do? He hasn’t believed in a long time. The little boy he used to be who would confess every Sunday wondered if there was anything in the world that would atone him.

Sometime later, Steve comes back. Bucky hears him knock on his own bedroom door and call his name. Bucky gets up and goes over to the door, but hesitates to open it. He knocks on it instead: _I’m over here._

“Dinner’s ready,” Steve says, his voice coming closer. “You should come and eat with us. I haven’t shown you the internet yet…”

Bucky doesn’t really want to be around anyone, but he doesn’t want Steve to worry more. He opens the door and slips through, and Steve’s face falls into relief. Bucky tries to smile.

“Come on. Sam’s a whiz in the kitchen. He’s been teaching me some tricks.” His hand comes up to lightly touch Bucky on the small of his back as they walk, but he drops it just as quickly.

Bucky wants to hold his hand, but instead he just says, “So he’s been teaching you how to properly boil a potato, huh?”

“Jerk,” Steve says, but he’s all fond about it. The thought of keeping their play fight going sounds exhausting, so Bucky doesn’t say anything in reply. They walk in silence down to the kitchen, where Sam is finishing serving up food on a bar.

“We usually eat in here, the dining table’s a bit too, uh, formal,” Steve says.

“It smells good,” Bucky offers, sitting on one of the stools. Steve hops up on the one next to him, and Sam sits opposite.

“Thanks, man,” Sam says.

They talk while they eat, mostly Sam and Steve making chatter between themselves and telling Bucky about things he’s missed. Sam tells Bucky about himself and manages to draw Bucky into conversation more than once. Bucky asks Steve about the Avengers.

Bucky hadn’t felt much like eating, but Steve and Sam keep shoveling so much food onto his plate that it’d be real obvious if he doesn’t eat it. It does taste really good, at least.

After dinner, Steve gets out what he calls a tablet, and Bucky’s first introduction to the internet is videos of dogs on a website called YouTube.

Steve knows how much Bucky loves dogs. It’s irritating, because he just wants to sit and be miserable. It’s the first time in hours that Bucky feels like he could smile or laugh again, and he does both when a dog sneezes itself awake and looks confused at the camera.

Then they expand their viewing into other animals. Cats, pandas, big cats, elephants, sloths, monkeys, pigs.

Bucky feels almost light by the time they move away from YouTube, and his cheeks hurt from smiling. Steve and Sam spend another couple of hours showing him the capabilities of the internet; it doesn’t take him long to pick up how to use Google, and the first thing he does is search for Captain America. Steve flushes bright red but doesn’t stop him, and he ends up back on YouTube watching a recording of Steve’s stage show. He’s never seen it before – no place to watch a recording in the middle of nowhere, he was captured when Steve came to camp, always something else to watch on the few breaks they got after – and he sniggers through it.

“I can’t believe this still exists,” Steve says, kindly waiting until the recording ends.

“Every kid in America’s seen it in history class,” Sam says. “Most of us knew the song better than the Pledge of Allegiance.”

Steve groans into his hands, and Bucky laughs again.

Grinning, Sam says, “Hey, man, you should hit up the current Rockettes. Bet you they’d love to do it over with you again now. Everyone loves a vintage.”

Eventually, they go to bed. Sam’s bedroom is the master on the floor below Steve’s, and he leaves for it after a hearty goodnight for both Steve and Bucky. Bucky’s pleased that he seems to have won Sam over… except the thought reminds him of the events of the morning, and the guilt comes crashing back down like an avalanche.

“Are you coming…?” Steve asks, not hesitantly, but making an effort to not try and force his own choice on Bucky. Bucky knows what Steve wants, of course – he wants Bucky to go back to his bedroom, and they could fuck or make out some more or whatever.

Bucky shakes his head. “Sorry, Steve.”

Steve gives his lousiest smile, so Bucky cups his hands round the back of Steve’s neck and kisses him. Steve sighs into it, holding Bucky’s waist, and when he pulls back his smile is a bit more genuine. Bucky doesn’t want to leave him like this but, short of giving in to Steve’s every desire, there’s not much he can do to cheer him up now.

He gives Steve a playful swat on his ass when he turns around, succeeding in making Steve jump and giving himself a small smile. It’s a smile that fades as soon as he returns to his temporary bedroom and he sees the file where he left it, open on the page detailing a training exercise in which he murdered a family whose only crime was living in Soviet Russia.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Now this is a chapter that took no fewer than six false starts before I finally hit on the change of POV. And then the chapter just flowed! Phew!

Steve can’t stop himself from watching Bucky. He’s not afraid to admit to himself that he’s worried, and he knows that both Sam and Bucky can tell how he’s feeling, but also that he won’t admit it to them. Bucky sometimes looks far away, which has been a habit ever since Azzanno, but now it’s worse. Steve considers it a small blessing that at least Bucky always comes back when Steve calls him.

Not long after they go all retire to bed on the second night, there’s a knock at Steve’s door. His heart leaps into his chest and his dick makes itself known, but he tells himself to calm down. He regrets stopping Bucky’s seduction of the day before. His dick can suffer.

It is Bucky at the door, but there’s no hunger on his face. Sure, his gaze is hot on Steve’s bare chest (because Steve has never been much good at the seduction game, about as subtle in the bedroom as on the battlefield, but he knows how to get the reaction he wants), but that’s not the reason he’s here.

His hair has been cut short. Steve wouldn’t know a split end if it smacked him in the face, but it’s obvious that Bucky’s just attacked his hair with a pair of scissors.

“Come on, I’ve got some clippers in the bathroom,” Steve says, and leads the way. “But just to warn you, I’m out of practice.”

Bucky perches on the edge of the bath and Steve retrieves his clippers from the cupboard under the sink. He turns on the buzzer, and Bucky says, “Hold on a minute,” and takes off his own shirt. “So hair doesn’t get on it,” he adds, which isn’t a lie, but also isn’t the truth.

Steve’s never been much good at the seduction game, but Bucky’s the best, and Steve’s been watching him his whole life.

They don’t talk while Steve cuts Bucky’s hair. He starts at the bottom, moving in short strokes and occasionally pausing to brush off Bucky’s shoulders. Slowly, the wonky lines of Bucky’s hair smooth out, close to his scalp, but not as close as Steve would have once done it. His muscle memory takes over, rusty as it is, and although Bucky’s hair doesn’t look as good as he used to wear it, it’s pretty close.

Eventually, Steve has to turn off the clippers. The bathroom is so silent that it’s all Steve can hear.

“All done,” he forces himself to say. What will Bucky do now? Leave, or stay?

“It looks great,” Bucky says, admiring himself from all angles in the mirror. “Thanks, Steve.”

“Anytime.”

Steve watches Bucky in the mirror as he fiddles with the longer hair on the top of his head, swooshing it this way and that, and is overcome with the urge to touch him himself. He decides to follow the urge through, and Bucky only startles a little when Steve slides his arms around Bucky’s muscular stomach. It’s still a little strange to be an inch and a half taller.

They’re both a little hard, but Steve ignores that for now.

“We’ll go out tomorrow,” Steve says.

“All three of us or just you and me?”

“You and me.”

“What about Sam?”

“He’s got stuff to do. Errands and that. He actually has a whole life outside of me.”

“How did he manage that?” Bucky murmurs to himself, eyes boring into Steve’s. Instead of a response, Steve ducks his head into Bucky’s naked shoulder and gently kisses it. He realizes a bit too late he’s on Bucky’s left side, with the metal arm, but carries on as if it was intentional.

Not quite kissing, he moves his lips slowly up the side of Bucky’s neck, and Bucky reflexively shivers. He tilts his head for Steve, and then turns around and meets him. Bucky’s arms hold him inescapably, and Bucky’s lips are soft and earnest.

Their bodies press together, both of them hardness and strength. They move back into the bedroom, somehow, and divest each other of their remaining clothes. Bucky’s fingers trace him, and in return Steve leaves bruises that heal too fast.

They don’t have much, but at the same time, more than they’ve ever had before. They have time, they have privacy, they have each other hale and the most whole they’ve ever been. Each touch is deliberate, each moan unrestrained. Bucky says Steve’s name over and over, more and more desperately as they move towards the end.

Bliss comes in the quiet moment after, when Steve, eyes closed, strokes Bucky’s face, and Bucky’s fingers create patterns over Steve’s rabbiting heart.

“I used to dream of this,” Bucky says.

“I never dared,” Steve replies.

Bliss fades to sleep, and Steve wakes up only once before morning: when Bucky slips from his bed with a kiss to his temple, and leaves Steve’s bedroom with an almost imperceptible click.

The next day, it’s as if last night had never happened. Sam compliments Bucky’s haircut with great effort, which Steve appreciates. But, although Steve and Bucky spend most of the day by themselves, going out to Ellis Island to look at museums with history older than themselves. They might have once called it a date. Steve isn’t sure now.

Sam’s gone for the next couple of days; now that Steve has Bucky back, Sam can sort out his affairs, reorganize his life to become a part-time Avenger. Steve takes Bucky out during the day, in a variety of casual disguises, and ignores it when Bucky frowns at nothing in particular. They begin the nights in their rooms on opposite sides of the hallway, but Bucky invariably joins him, only to be gone again by morning.

A few days after Bucky’s come back, they’ve put off going out because outside is an unpleasant combination of wind and rain. Steve says, “You know, Peggy’s still alive,” in a voice as hesitant as it is hopeful. “She’s not far. Just upstate.”

“Steve, you know I was never that close to Agent Carter,” Bucky says, even though he knows that Steve knows he’s lying.

“You don’t have to come in with me. Just come on a ride with me.”

Bucky does, and although he initially waits in the car, soon enough he’s joining Steve in Peggy’s room. Steve tries not to let on how happy he is to see Bucky, even if he doesn’t say much, even if Peggy only recognizes either of them half the time.

Bucky holds Steve’s hand the whole ride back to New York.

It’s still not very late when they get back to the safe house, but they cook themselves an early dinner. Steve thinks about broaching the topic of what comes next, but seeing Peggy on a bad day has put him in a bit of a funk. Bucky cheers him up with a few games of cards. They bet with chips, then clothes, then sexual acts, and promise not to tell Sam that anything untoward happened in a public space.

Sam returns that night, so Steve makes another big meal while Bucky retires to his room. Steve hasn’t been into Bucky’s bedroom, but he’s seen inside from the hallway. The backpack is still packed, and the Winter Soldier dossier is on the bedside table.

Steve waits up all night for Bucky, who doesn’t come. In the morning, the dossier is propped up against Steve’s door. It lands with a sad little thump on Steve’s carpet when he opens the door, and without even thinking, Steve sits down, picks it up, and flicks through.

No pages are missing, and everything is in the order Steve left it. He lightly touches the small photograph of Bucky in his US uniform – which had become something of a ritual in the three weeks he’s had the file – and then removes it from the dossier completely. He slips it into his breast pocket, feeling like a sentimental sap. Bucky would take the shit out of him if he knew, and quite rightly, but it feels damn good anyway. No one has to know.

He’d hoped against it, but now that he has the dossier back in his possession, he reflects that he’d always known Bucky would leave again. This is what was in the backs of Bucky’s eyes when he spent the last few days staring into the distance. It had only been a matter of time.

He wants to search the house for Bucky, but he tries not to do fruitless things. Instead he slips the dossier back into his drawer and then goes down to the kitchen, where he starts up a pot of coffee for Sam. It takes a fair bit of prep: a morning like this one needs proper coffee beans, that haven’t been pre-ground, that probably cost more than a month’s rent in his old walk-up per bean. Truthfully, although Sam likes the luxury, Steve’s more of an instant kinda guy. Sam’s got him to try out all the dressed-up coffees on the Starbucks menu, so it’s not for lack of trying, at least. Steve’s probably just got too much of the Depression in him still.

About twenty minutes later, Sam joins him in the kitchen, saving him from philosophizing anymore about coffee. Just as well, really. He was starting to get maudlin. He wordlessly passes Sam his coffee and then turns away to start on breakfast. He’s no expert, but he’s had some time to experiment in the last year. He knows how to cook what he likes. Peggy gave him a recipe for a full English breakfast, and luckily these cupboards have almost all the ingredients. Without black pudding, American blood sausage will have to do.

“Would your long face have to do with why Bucky isn’t eating with us?” Sam asks as Steve starts laying a whole packet of bacon on a frying pan. Steve briefly considers lying, but his conscience and common sense rule it out before the thought has even finished forming.

“Bucky’s gone.”

“You sure it was Bucky who left, and not the Winter Soldier?”

Steve shoots him a sharp look over his shoulder, and Sam raises his hands in defense.

“Someone had to say it.”

“I wasn’t even thinking it.”

“I figured.”

They fall silent while the bacon fries. God, it smells good.

Steve isn’t mad at Sam. God knows he appreciates the guy – they’ve only known each other for a month, they _had_ only known each other for barely a week when Sam changed his entire life for Steve. Steve’s glad to have Sam at his back, exactly the kind of guy Steve needed. He’s not afraid to count Sam among his closest friends, as someone he can depend on with his life. He’s done it a number of times already.

So that’s why he’s not mad at Sam, even though Sam doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Steve knows that Sam thinks – that Natasha would too, if she were here – that Bucky’s his honking great blind spot. But he isn’t. Steve would swear that in front of his parents, in front of God and the Devil. If Bucky were a blind spot, Steve wouldn’t be able to think so clearly.

When Bucky died – or when Steve thought Bucky had died – Steve swore revenge and death on every single Hydra operative. His own sacrifice had been genuine, thinking of the people of his country: he stopped the bombs from reaching land, and by not giving out his coordinates he’d kept the Tesseract from people who would use it as a weapon. (Or he’d thought he had: it seems that every effort he made during the war was for nothing.) He would defend his actions on the _Valkyrie_ until his second death.

And yeah, deep in his heart he was thinking of Bucky, but not in the way that Bucky (and everyone else) clearly thought. Whether or where he joined Bucky in the afterlife wasn’t the point; what mattered was that Bucky’s body was never going to be recovered, buried by snow and ice, and Steve didn’t deserve any more than that. This decision he would also defend until his second death, though he knows that most people won’t see it that way. Hell, most of them won’t even believe him.

But that’s how it is with Bucky. He isn’t a blind spot, and Steve isn’t a romantic man driven by romantic notions. It’s that Bucky is more important than anything else and Steve won’t let him down again.

He’ll let them think that Bucky’s a blind spot though. All considered, it’ll make them worry less.

“If he’d been the Winter Soldier, he would’ve tried to kill us,” Steve says abruptly, dropping the tongs on the counter. Sam startles; he’s been filling out the crossword in a paper and obviously not paying attention to Steve.

“Point,” Sam says. He lays down his pen and smiles apologetically. “Look, I didn’t mean to upset you. I didn’t actually think it could’ve been. The guy he was last night, and the days before I left…”

“That was Bucky.” Joy swells unbidden in Steve’s chest, and from the look on Sam’s face Steve isn’t hiding it well.

“He’s a cool guy.”

Steve can’t help it; he grins. “One of the best guys I’ve ever known.”

Sam considers him, and then he nods to himself before saying, “Tell me to shut up if it’s too personal, but I wanna ask…” He pauses. Steve moves the bacon off the grill; he has a feeling he’s not gonna like Sam’s question and he doesn’t want the meat to burn. “It’s not just friendship between you two, is it?”

The pan handle crumples in Steve’s hand and Sam flinches at the noise.

“I’m not here to judge or condemn or whatever you might think,” he says quickly, “and I’m not gonna tell anyone either. Your business is your business, and you don’t have to tell me shit if you don’t want to. But as your friend, I’d appreciate the heads up.”

In Steve’s quest to assimilate to the twenty-first century, he knows all about equality and gay rights, and the journey to get them. People being queer had been kind of an open secret when Steve was growing up, though it meant a whole lot of different things.

He finds himself wanting to tell Sam the truth. Not the whole truth, but something… honest. He at least owes Sam that.

Definitely not that they’d already fucked on two of the couches.

“I don’t know, Sam,” he says. “We’ve been each other’s world since we were kids. Whatever that meant, we loved each other. And still do.”

His face is burning, so he breaks off, shrugs, and turns back to the breakfast. The bacon gets tipped onto a plate and Steve starts cracking open eggs.

“Thanks, Steve,” Sam says.

“Uh huh. How do you like your eggs? I can do scrambled or scrambled.”

Sam chuckles. “Scrambled is fine. Hey, you gonna be much longer over there? It smells good and I’m starving.”

After breakfast and after dishes, Sam asks, “So are we gonna go after him this time?”

Steve shakes his head. He thinks of the folder returned to him, a note in itself. “No, not this time.” But by God, does he want to. The difference now, though, is that he knows that Bucky’s… well, okay might be the wrong word. He's alive. Well. Himself. That's all Steve could ask for, except for Bucky to also be happy and with him. And if he has to sacrifice the latter to get the former… His heart seizes at the thought, but he'll do it. And he’ll wait for as long as it takes, no matter how much his soul tells him to track Bucky down.

He and Sam get changed into their running gear and head out while it's still early. Steve keeps pace with Sam as they jog down to the beachfront (he doesn't need a warm-up thanks to the serum, but Sam’s an organic, non-GMO human), but when they get there Steve takes off with a smart comment. Sam yells after him and Steve laughs, and all the while his soul aches with Bucky's absence.

 

* * *

  
 

Tony collapses onto the couch next to Steve, startling him out of his thoughts, and shoves a mug of mocha into his hands. Steve takes a sip as Tony talks.

“Cap, you are officially bad energy. You’ve been sulking around my tower for five weeks now, which is a dick move since I’m letting you live here rent-free. Your little grey raincloud is starting to depress Pepper.”

“Pepper’s been in Tokyo for two weeks.”

“Well, your chi is just that bad, buddy. It’s infecting the _robots_. Dum-E keeps laying across the counter, and JARVIS is only playing Adele. Isn’t that right, JARVIS?”

Steve drinks another mouthful of his mocha. He only vaguely understands what Tony’s on about, though he knows that Tony’s only blathering. He’s noticed that the man is extra confusing and blasé when he’s trying not to show he has feelings – though he can’t figure out if it’s on purpose or subconsciously – and Tony’s attempts at diversion, like Tony, are about as subtle as a volcanic eruption.

“Tony, I appreciate your concern—”

“Pepper’s concern.”

“—but I’m fine.”

“You are a _terrible_ liar.”

Steve shrugs. He would like to tell Tony the truth – Tony is unsubtle but he knows how to be discreet if he wants to – but so far there are only five people alive in the world who know that Bucky’s alive, and Steve’s going to protect him for as long as he can. Even if that means keeping him a secret from the other Avengers.

They sit in silence for a moment, and then Tony snatches the mug back out of Steve’s hands just as he goes to drink from it again. “You don’t deserve my sympathy coffee,” he says.

“Thanks, Tony,” Steve says dryly.

Steve goes back to looking out the window. He knows he should tell his teammates about Bucky, but God only knows how they'll react. Thor – he thinks – would simply be glad for him. They're something of kindred spirits; although Steve holds no good feelings towards Loki, they both know how it feels to lose a dear brother in arms. The others… Tony especially would want to know _everything_ , regardless of what anyone else wanted, and Bucky's past is his own to decide who to tell.

If Bucky comes back – _when_ Bucky comes back – he can choose for himself. Tony will still look into, well, whatever Bucky tells him, but it’ll be Bucky’s choice.

But anyway, Steve doesn't even want to tell them for himself and his own reasons, they're stupid reasons, and selfish: Bucky doesn't need _protection_ , and Steve would be socked in the face if he called Bucky _his_. (It's a nice thought, Bucky being his, and vice versa, and they are, but there's always been a qualifier. His best friend, his brother, his brother in arms, his lover, his partner. Whatever, though, Steve’ll take it.)

But Tony is right about one thing: Steve's been moping around this Tower for way too long. Since groceries are delivered and the Tower has a super-strength gym, the only times Steve's gone outside lately are to cut off another head of Hydra or to mope on the subway. He knows the F intimately well, and not just because he spent four hours hunting down giant mutated rats through the tunnels not too long ago.

Today, though, he dons his jacket and baseball cap and walks. He takes the long way round – up across 53rd and down 2nd, through Hell’s Kitchen and Chelsea and following the river down to the Brooklyn Bridge. From there it’s a short walk to the Promenade.

For a couple of hours he paces up and down the path, hoping beyond reason that Bucky will simply materialize like last time. Of course, last time Steve had been looking for any possible hint of Bucky’s whereabouts, so as soon as Bucky appeared in public and stood still for more than a few minutes Steve had known where he was. Now he's trying to respect Bucky's wishes by _not_ doing that. So he walks.

Unsurprisingly, he ends up back at Manhattan Beach. He walks past the safe house twice before he thinks, _fuck it_ , and goes inside. Via the back entrance, of course; even if New Yorkers don’t care who he is, it would be just his fucking luck for someone to tweet a photo of him entering the safe house.

It’s clear that someone’s been here in the weeks since Steve and Sam left – there’s no dust on the bookshelves and a fresh lemon scent in the air. No one’s moved in, though. This is exactly how they found the house the first time: empty but looked after. Steve wonders what the cleaners think of this house, and what they thought during the time Steve and Sam occupied it.

He checks the cupboards – empty. After Sam had gone back to DC and before Steve moved to Avengers Tower, he’d packed up all the leftover food and anonymously delivered it to a couple of homeless shelters across the city. Considering that the cupboards had been fully stocked when Steve moved in, it’s strange they’re empty now.

Or Steve’s just distracting himself. Occupying his thoughts with the idiosyncrasies of a house he doesn’t know to stop them from going _here’s where Bucky laughed_ and _there’s where Bucky yelled at me_ and _that’s the couch where Bucky jerked himself off_ and _why the hell did I force him to read that fucking folder_.

Why is he here? Bucky’s gone. And even if he wasn’t, he wouldn’t be here twiddling his thumbs waiting for Steve.

He walks through the kitchen anyway. There’s a flicker in his chest that beats with _maybe Bucky’s here_. A sign that Bucky’s okay. There hasn’t been anything on the news, and he hasn’t heard anything from any of the broken Hydra cells about recovering the Winter Soldier. (He’s not looking for Bucky… he’s just keeping an ear out for trouble. He’ll abide by Bucky’s implied wishes, but not at the expense of not supplying back-up.)

He notices the postcards immediately when he steps into the hallway. This is a safe house; it doesn’t _get_ post. And yet, like a klaxon coming to life in the middle of the night, five postcards lie against the cream carpet.

Steve’s heart leaps into his throat, and at the same time the bottom drops out of his stomach. He approaches cautiously, not out of any real sense of danger but to give himself time to temper his feelings. But soon enough, he’s standing right next to them, and the second postcard is turned up to the ceiling. He instantly recognizes neat schoolboy penmanship, and he drops to his knees before even realizing he’s done so.

Five postcards, the earliest dated a mere six days after Bucky left and the latest nine days ago. None of them have an addressee and none of them are signed, but Steve doesn’t have a doubt to either. The first postcard is of Texas with New Mexico postage; the second from Peru with Brazilian postage; the third from New Zealand with Indonesian postage; the fourth a Chinese card with a Singaporean stamp; and the fifth a postcard of himself with Canadian postage. Whether this is to confuse Steve or to safeguard against anyone who might read them, it makes no difference. They read:

> _Got a ride here from a nice fella. You would’ve liked him. The world’s really changed, I think it’s mostly for the good. Yours, X_
> 
> _Some places still aren’t great. Not sure what our excuse is. Saw you on the news, great work. You sleeping alright? I’m not, don’t worry about me though, I’m safe. ~~I miss~~_ _X_
> 
> _Feel like we went wrong somewhere, maybe we should’ve gone AWOL way back when, but then I couldn’t have asked you to do that and I know you never would’ve forgiven me. Someone had to watch your back anyway. ~~I’m~~ ~~I~~ I’m sorry for leaving like I did. Yours (?), X_
> 
> _I never realized how big the world is even though we’ve been on opposite ends before. Didn’t even know what a platypus was. Do now. Stupid looking thing, thought of you. X_
> 
> _ATE VIETNAMESE NOODLES, INCREDIBLE X_ (accompanied by a small doodle of a steaming bowl)

Steve’s surprised to realize that the world is swimming, and he takes a slow breath (and then another and another) to stop the tears before they fall. He’s… unspeakably relieved. For one that Bucky’s okay, and more so because it’s undeniable proof that Bucky’ll come back to him. When he’s ready. Which’ll be too long for Steve – hell, it’s been too long already – but he can tough it out. The number of times he’s come back from the brink of (or even literal) death, this shouldn’t be a problem.

When he gets back to the Tower, postcards tucked carefully into an inside pocket of his jacket, he subversively asks JARVIS to create a program to look for news on Bucky. He doesn’t tell the AI that’s what it’s for, though he’s sure it figures it out. Doesn’t tell Tony though, so he’s grateful for that. Checks in first thing in the morning and last thing at night, and tries to visit the safe house every day in case of more postcards.

Bucky never really talks about what he’s doing as he travels the world, but Steve and JARVIS manage to connect a couple of dots every now and then. He does his duty when called upon, and sometimes when he isn’t, and tries to meet new people and waits for Bucky to come home.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter requires a special disclaimer, which is an apology to anyone in Australia who has done any sort of ancestry or detective work. I tried. If I've really bollocked it up and it's annoying (god knows I have my own pet peeves in fanfic and origfic!) then please drop me a comment here or on Tumblr!

Bucky wants to go home, but ain’t nothing new there. There have been moments, even days, that his heart hasn’t dreamt of his own bed in the city he intimately knows – but it’s been his dearest wish since he stepped foot in mainland Europe.

It’s been so long now, and the memories don’t feel like his, and he’s starting to forget. What had been the name of the bakery the Barneses had got their bread from every Saturday? Who had he sat next to in class? Steve would know. Too bad Bucky hadn’t been able to stand to look at him.

He’s sharing an abandoned building with roughly sixteen other squatters. The number changes every night, and one day soon it’ll be his turn to disappear without a word. He’s not just been in Canberra too long, but he’s spent a month in Australia now and his postcards are running low.

He hopes his postcards are getting to Steve. He’s been picking them up everywhere, especially after he’d sent the first couple and decided he liked the idea. They’ve become the only time he really lets himself think of Steve lately.

Well, except for these maudlin nights when there’s no one to talk to but the lonely, the forgotten and the abandoned.

He hopes Steve knows he didn’t want to leave him again.

When Bucky had snuck out five months ago, he’d done it with little idea of what to actually do. He can’t change the past – dead is dead, whatever proof he might be otherwise. But at least if he left, if he went out into the real world instead of pretending everything was fine in an oversized dollhouse in a Brooklyn a world apart from what he knows, then that would at least be something.

He still thinks he made the right choice. He’s still not sure he’s worth it.

Bucky waits for the last person to fall asleep – or otherwise deep enough into a drug-induced stupor that they may well be asleep – and then rolls up his sleeping mat and attaches it to his backpack. He might come back tomorrow, or he might not, but his mind is too restless to lay still tonight.

He goes on a long walk. At 4am, the city is relatively quiet. September in Canberra is mild, but there aren’t too many cars on the road in this neighborhood. There are a few hours before the National Archives open for him to continue his research, so he keeps walking until then.

“Morning,” says the nice lady behind the desk at ten minutes past the hour. Her name is Mo Jacobi, and she thinks Bucky’s name is Louis and he’s an American backpacker exploring his roots. He smiles at her charmingly, doesn’t make too much of an impression, but she still brings him coffee if he’s still poring over records at eleven o’clock.

There are forty-two names in the dossier containing the Winter Soldier’s sins. As best he can tell, thirteen of them were enemies of the Soviet Union, six were ex- or rogue KGB officers, and twenty-three were enemies of Hydra. For all those names, not even half of them have marked graves.

The dossier doesn’t list the lives lost in the crossfire. He’s had to figure out those names himself.

It’s one of those names that even brings him to Australia; he was never sent here as the Winter Soldier. Back in Egypt in 1973, an unfortunate tourist called Devon Myers was caught up in a car crash of Bucky’s making, and died three days later in hospital without regaining consciousness even once. His name hadn’t been printed anywhere, because no one had known him. It had been pure luck that Bucky had even found out about him.

But Devon had come from Australia. He had a sister who never knew what had happened to him, and who had moved away from Canberra with her husband and a young daughter.

Bucky’s been trying to track them down. He’s managed to find some of Devon’s final possessions in a forgotten storage room. Whether or not they’ll be able to give the dead man’s relatives any peace of mind – or even if they’ll recognize them for what they are – Bucky doesn’t know. But there’s not much else he can do.

Today he finally gets lucky: diving into a dusty cardboard, he finds a record of a name change, and from there, a forwarding address. He emerges from the room victoriously, and gives Ms. Jacobi a kiss on the cheek.

“Do write when you find your family,” she implores him, blushing a little.

“Of course!” Bucky lies cheerily, and then leaves.

His research moves quickly after that. It’s not more than a few days before he finds Emma Olivier née Myers’s new house and leaves the little package on her doorstep. Less than a week later, he’s making his way to Indonesia on a small cargo boat, one postcard lighter.

 

* * *

 

Being in Russia makes Bucky nervous. It’s not the lingering shadow of the Soviet Union – he doesn’t even remember it, for the most part. But what memories he does have are sharp and bloody, and leave him with an unsettling understanding of four different dialects.

Unfortunately, Russia is where a good portion of his victims have been permanently laid to rest, with or without markers. He ends up revisiting the country four times in his time away, just to give his nerves a break.

Every night, he mentally lays out his list of names. It had gone from forty-two to into the hundreds, but over thirty weeks on, it’s dwindled down to just three. They aren’t any of the original names, but one that actually comes from a glimpse around the scars in his memory.

He didn’t remember her name, had had to get it from an old KGB base, and even now it doesn’t strike a chord. Raisa Vasilyevna Malkova could have been any woman he passes on the street. But he remembers her white skin and black hair, the pain from the electric rod she wielded, and the red of her blood trickling from her mouth when he snapped her neck.

The people he’s visiting now aren’t even her direct descendants; they’re from a cousin’s line. He doesn’t think he has anything to atone for with her death, really. But he knocks on their door, begging for food, the very image of a vagrant. The father shuts a door in his face and Bucky can hear him call the police, but a small hand holding half a loaf of bagged bread pokes out through the cat flap.

Bucky bends down and takes the bread without touching her hand. “Thank you,” he says in Russian.

The little boy blushes, the cat flap closes, and Bucky’s long gone by the time any policemen come by.

 

* * *

 

The ship lands in New York a little past six a.m., and it’s as dark and bitingly cold as it had been seven days ago when they’d departed from Southampton. _Finally made the boat home,_ Bucky thinks to himself, and it’s not as bitter as he’d have expected. He finds the captain to pay the last of what he owes and steals away from the boat as soon as he’s able. It’d been some luck finding a freighter who was willing to take on an extra hand in exchange for cheap travel to New York.

The port is coming to life around him; the ship he arrived on is the first one of the day, but the workers don’t look in any hurry to start unloading it. Can’t blame them – Bucky’s body is used to all kinds of abuse and he can still feel the chill creeping into his bones. Cranes roar and screech, startling the still air, and Bucky secures his backpack, pulls his collar up round his ears and hurries away.

For all that he’s been gone for the past seven months, and for the last week has had nothing but time on his hands, Bucky doesn’t actually have a plan. He has the _outlines_ of a plan for sure (“see Steve again”) – which is more than the Howlies had on some of their missions, and they all survived those, more or less. He just doesn’t have the fucking faintest idea of how to go about it. He’d been hoping that he’d get to New York and things would resolve themselves, which has never worked out for him in the past but he’d been hoping that this time he’d catch a break.

He ducks into the first open coffee shop he sees, catching the barista mid-yawn. The girl looks embarrassed, but Bucky waves her off and asks for a large Americano and the barista’s recommendation off the menu, and then orders two of those. He tips 100%, scoffs the first one down under the barista’s bemused gaze, and then asks about the quickest way to Brooklyn.

“Uh, well,” the barista stammers. Bucky finally looks at her name tag; it says ‘Lorna’. “There’s the ferry, I guess, but I think that goes to Manhattan? So you’d have to take the subway? So I guess – I mean – the best way to Brooklyn is probably over the bridge.”

“Bridge?”

“The Verrazano Bridge – uh, Verrazano-Narrows, that is. I – I don’t know where it is though, I always get the ferry ‘cause it’s free and there’s the subway and everything right there when you get to Manhattan.”

Bucky considers, swallows down the rest of his coffee, carefully packs his second sandwich into his backpack, and drops his last two dollars into the tip jar. Lorna boggles at him. “Thanks,” Bucky says.

“Y-yeah, sure, dude,” Lorna says, and Bucky leaves the coffee shop. He immediately wishes to go back inside: it’s still dark, the wind’s picked up and it’s starting to fucking _snow_. Can’t catch a single fucking break today, apparently.

He picks up his pace to a light jog, continuing in a direction away from the port and hopefully towards New York proper. Either the bridge or the ferry… He’s done his homework so he knows Steve’s living in the Avengers Tower in Manhattan, but Brooklyn is the blood in his veins, is where his heart beats for. Manhattan’s nice and all, but it’s no home.

In the end, his decision is made for him: he doesn’t have small enough change for a bus ride ( _piss poor planning there, Barnes_ ), so he has no choice but to go for that free ferry ride. (Still no way to walk from Staten Island to the main unless you want to walk through New Jersey, and that just won’t fucking do.) Once he’s found the terminal, he only has to wait for fourteen minutes for a ferry, and although it’s still snowing, at least the sun’s finally started to rise. There are eight other passengers, and they all ignore each other.

The sun’s finally broken the horizon by the time they get to Manhattan half an hour later. The subway entrance is packed, so Bucky goes in the other direction.

How should he approach Avengers Tower? Just knock on the front door: “Hi, I’m Captain America’s childhood friend. You may be wondering how I’m still alive. Me too! Kidding, I’ve been used as an assassin by America’s enemies and only just begun to make peace with it. No, wait, don’t call the cops!”

What a joke.

He still hasn’t decided when he reaches the Tower. So he walks past it, does a loop of the block. He walks past it again, doubles back, and then forces himself to sit on a bench opposite the building. He only lasts for twenty seconds before leaping back to his feet and escaping through Central Park.

He’s literally stared death in the face more times than all his digits can count and directed its hand numerous other times, and yet it’s the thought of seeing his best friend again that sends his heart rocketing round his ribcage.

He walks while berating himself, and wishing he’d saved enough money to buy another coffee for his freezing fingers. Or – like so long ago – he wants for Steve’s extra clothes, with Steve himself marching ahead without a worry in the world.

The buildings grow tall around him. He realizes he’s been walking south and adds that to his list of today’s shortcomings.

Nothing for it though. There’s nowhere left for him to go, not in Brooklyn, definitely not in Manhattan or the Bronx. Once upon a time, there would’ve been three different apartments he’d have been able to crash at in this neighborhood alone, and seven other places to while away the time at. They’re probably all dead now, or shut down. He’s probably the only person left who remembers them.

He crosses the bridge, overtaking bundled-up pedestrians and dodging cyclists who can’t stay in the cycle path. It’s a long walk to the safe house in Manhattan Beach, but it’s also not like he’s got anything better to do. He considers going back to what he now knows is called the Promenade. It’s a helluva view nowadays, and he bets it’ll look real pretty in the snow. But he doesn’t want to stop moving just yet.

He’s barely made it past Prospect Park when the back of his neck prickles, and he goes on high alert. He’s had a few run ins with Hydra cells and other groups who want to use the Winter Soldier, and he’s not exactly been wishing for another one on his home turf.

Bucky has never been the greatest at espionage, but he knows a few tricks. He uses passing windows and reflections in cars to look behind him, ducks down an alley, climbs the walls to reach a fire escape and goes across a couple of roofs. He drops back down to the ground a few streets over and runs through the traffic.

The prickle remains, so he enters a small church, surprising the few people practicing hymns inside.

“Sorry,” Bucky says, trying to look contrite. “Uh, do you have a bathroom I can use?”

They must think he’s homeless, and to be fair he has spent the last few nights sleeping poorly on a ship. They show him where the toilets are and offer him coffee and biscuits, which he declines, and then slithers out a window into the kind of alley that gives alleys a bad name.

He’s barely straightened up again when a hand grabs his shoulder and a voice says, “Hey—” and Bucky swings even as the familiar voice registers.

It’s too late to stop himself: his flesh fist meets his supposed assailant’s jaw with a loud crack, and pain explodes in two of his knuckles. Steve’s head has jerked to the side, but there’s not even any pinkness on his skin.

“What the _fuck_ , Steve, was that you fucking following me?!” he demands, even as he cradles his broken hand.

Steve doesn’t even have the goddamn grace to look guilty. “I was gonna just walk up to you but then you took off.”

“They’re called _evasive maneuvers_ , you asshole. Don’t suppose you’ve ever heard of them, seeing as they’re supposed to get you away from a fight.”

“Had to use them a lot lately, Buck?” Steve’s tone is glib, but his expression is anything but.

Bucky glowers at him. Steve adopts a hangdog expression, and with the slow catching on his hair and melting in his eyelashes, he looks pathetic enough that Bucky can’t bring himself to stay mad. He sighs and, acquiescing, says, “Been keeping yourself busy while I’ve been gone?”

“Oh, you know. Mad scientists, terrorist cells, business as usual.”

“Yeah, same here.”

They both hesitate for a moment, the weight of the past seven months of their separation – the past sixty-nine years of separation – hanging in the air like an avalanche waiting to happen. Then Bucky steps forward and slings his arm over Steve’s shoulders like he had in so many alleys like this one (except now he’s half an inch shorter than Steve, and it’s weird how he can’t remember how it felt for Steve to be shorter than him), and he says, “Come on, let’s go meet the family.”

“But your hand—”

“It’s not that bad,” Bucky says, lying through his teeth. But he knows for a fact that Howard Stark’s son is at the Tower at the moment, and he wants to get it over with. He wasn’t exactly Stark’s biggest fan, and he’s seen Stark Jr.’s interviews.

Luckily, even Steve is stupid enough to ride a motorbike in this weather.

 

* * *

 

Bucky and Tony stare at each other, and Steve keeps fidgeting next to him. He’s on the very edge of Bucky’s periphery, but Bucky can feel his weight shifting every seven seconds. It’s a helpful distraction from how much Tony looks like Howard – sure, Bucky’s seen photos of all the Avengers while he’s been travelling around and he saw the similarities then, but that’s nothing compared to seeing him in person.

Tony’s the first to break the silence.

“Cap, this is the reason you’ve been hooking up with JARVIS so much lately?”

He waves a jelly-covered knife in Bucky’s direction. Bucky would be offended if he hadn’t got used to Starks ignoring him for Steve by 1944.

“Who’s JARVIS?” Bucky asks.

«That would be me, Sergeant Barnes.» The voice has a slightly robotic edge and seemingly comes from nowhere and everywhere. Bucky manages not to startle, but he can’t help but look round for the source.

“JARVIS is an AI,” Stark says, smugness oozing out in every direction. “That stands for ‘Just A Really Very Intelligent System’ and ‘artificial intelligence’, respectively, and artificial intelligence is an advanced—”

“Are you always such a dick?” Bucky cuts him off. He’s too old to deal with this bullshit.

“Cap likes the feisty type, huh?” He looks at Steve. “Okay, we can keep him, but just so you know I’m not feeding him, taking him for walks or changing his litter. He’s potty-trained, right?”

“Tony,” Steve says heavily.

“Yeah, yeah. You’re gonna tell me the whole story of how the fuck he’s here later, by the way, but I have a feeling I’ll want a whiskey or twelve and Pep _will_ find out if I start drinking before noon. Now go away, I need to process another dead-not-dead soldier turning up in my home and eat my sandwich.”

Steve sighs, and he shrugs when Bucky looks at him. Together, they turn back to the elevator, which opens as they approach.

“For what it’s worth,” Tony calls after them. He’s still turned away, making his sandwich, “it’s probably a good thing you’re not dead.”

“Good meeting you too,” Bucky says.

The elevator doors close and JARVIS asks, «Your floor, Captain?»

“Thanks, JARVIS.”

“You have a _floor_?” Steve knocks him with his arm, but Bucky doesn’t stop smirking. “Do you have a private plane too?”

“It’s for the Aveng—”

“Holy _shit_ , Steve!”

The elevator doors open; Bucky’s impressed that he didn’t feel them moving at all.

“You’re such a jerk. Come on, I’ll give you a tour.”

“Yeah, show me the kitchen first. I need ice – I think your face actually broke my hand.”

“Well, you’re always telling me I’ve got a hard head.”

Steve’s floor is small compared to the safe house and the rest of the Tower. The elevator opens straight into an open living room/diner/kitchen area with couches, a TV, speakers, bookshelves, a fully stocked kitchen and floor-to-ceiling windows boasting a great view of Central Park. Funny to think Bucky was down there freaking out just a few hours ago.

There are four doors, which Steve tells him are a bedroom, a second living space, a small library and a full bathroom suite “complete with hot tub bathtub” as he gets a bag of peas from the freezer and wraps it in a towel.

“We can, uh, change the second living room into a bedroom for you. Who needs two anyway, right?” Steve says, and only afterwards hands over the peas.

“You tryna get rid of me, Rogers?”

Steve practically convulses at the idea – his face gets all sour and pinched for a second before he forces it back to neutral. Bucky’s just grins. There’s been plenty of time for Steve to move on, and yet, that had been one of the few things Bucky _hadn’t_ worried about.

“Nah, I don’t think we’ll need a second bedroom,” he says, looking down for a moment to concentrate on shifting the peas, and to give himself a moment. When he looks back up, Steve has a real pleased smile on his face, and Bucky gives him a wonky smile back.

There’s still a bit of tension in him, though, about the unknown. He still remembers the Winter Soldier dossier back to front, but he’d run the fuck away before he could find out what happened that isn’t in there. And he’s still gotta meet the rest of the Avengers.

“Can we sit down?” he says.

“Sure,” Steve says, leading them over to the couches. Bucky sits next to him and turns so he’s directing himself at Steve head on. “Is everything okay?”

“Guess we’ll find out. I wanna know… more, about the Winter Soldier.”

Steve steels himself, and Bucky smiles apologetically.

“Sorry.”

“No, it’s okay. I’ll answer as best I can.”

“When did you find out about him… me? How did I get away from Hydra?”

Steve looks unhappy, his brow heavy and his jaw tight.

“I ain’t gonna like this, am I?”

Steve grimaces. “Nope.” Still, he takes a deep breath and then tells Bucky everything that happened in April. It can’t take more than fifteen minutes, but when he talks about their fighting over humanity’s fate… The bottom drops out of Bucky’s stomach, and his hands clench into fists without his say-so even though it brings the ache back to his knuckles.

“But it wasn’t you,” Steve emphasizes. “Hydra had control, and Pierce was a manipulative bastard. When I broke through to you, you stopped fighting, and you saved my life. Bucky.” Steve moves right up to Bucky, puts a hand on Bucky’s neck and pulls him close, and with his other hand straightens out Bucky’s fists. “Bucky, you fought off decades of conditioning, and the first thing you did was jump into a river to drag me out of it.”

Bucky bumps his forehead against Steve’s, closes his eyes and croaks, “What the hell were you doing in a river?”

“Diving lessons.”

Bucky chokes on a laugh, and then to his shame starts to cry. He hides it in Steve’s collar, burying his face into Steve’s jacket and clutching at him with both hands, broken knuckles be damned. Steve returns the favor, wrapping his arms tight around Bucky. He can feel Steve shaking too, but lets him keep to himself whether it’s from tears or emotion.

They’re fucking messes, the both of them. History still hovers over him like a phantom, something he’ll never be rid of. He’s figured out how to exist in this modern world but he doesn’t know what his purpose is anymore. He’s not sure he can carry on fighting.

But he kisses Steve, and Steve kisses him, so for right now at least the rest of the world can go fuck itself.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope you've all had as great a ride with this fic as I have. This idea has been knocking around my head since 2015, and I can't believe I've finally finished it! These last few months have been such a blast, despite my turbulent offline life. (Let's be honest, the last three years I've had a turbulent offline life. But at least now I'm writing fic again!)
> 
> Once again, huge huge huge thanks to Anoushka and to Annina for all your hard work going on this journey with me! To Annina especially, because I've already hitched myself to Hannah's wagon and she'll be hard-pressed to ever get rid of me, haha. And also to the Big Bang mods, for the second chance when I missed that deadline. /o\
> 
> And thanks once again to all of you for reading. <3


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